Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka

Low In Shalka Hole

Doctor Who -
Scream Of The Shalka
Internet Airdate:
13th November - 18th December 2003
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray
Six Flash Animated Episodes

I’ve been meaning to watch Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka for quite some time now but, despite picking up a cheap second hand DVD of the story sometime during the pandemic, I could never quite bring myself to do so. In the 9 year gap between the ‘almost but not quite any good’ Doctor Who - The Movie (reviewed by me here) and the start of the ‘official ninth Doctor’ (or tenth if, like me and any sane and reasonable person who isn’t mathematically challenged, you realise John Hurt’s The War Doctor is also able to be numbered in terms of his chronological appearance in the show), we were left with nothing much happening for the show’s 40th anniversary. And so, this series of six, short webisodes, running between ten and fifteen minutes each, gave us the first ‘ninth Doctor’ as voiced by Richard E. Grant (who shared a breakout movie with the previous actor to play The Doctor, Paul McGann, in Withnail & I).

Now, as the show went on to bigger and, arguably ‘better’ (but maybe not so better for a long time now) things, Scream Of The Shalka was dumped as being non-canon to the series. Which is a shame because, a) it’s actually Richard E. Grants second spin as The Doctor, following a live action appearance in a nonsensically bad (if memory serves) Comic Relief special and b) The Master is voiced by none other than classic Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi... who would, of course, turn out to be the ‘surprise’, hidden in plain sight even from himself, incarnation of The Master making his debut in a memorable David Tennant episode of the series, before regenerating into John Simm.

We even have The Doctor picking up a nicely played new companion, Alison, voiced by Sophie Okonedo, who would of course go on to play Liz Ten aka Queen Elizabeth 10th in two episodes of Matt Smith’s tenure in the show. Not to mention a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ voice appearance by a pre-Doctor David Tennant in one episode of this story.

And, it’s a shame this isn’t considered canon and Richard E. Grant wasn’t picked up to continue the role (mainly due to future show runner Russell T. Davies absolutely hating his performance here, from what I understand) because, all in all, I quite enjoyed this one when I sat down to watch it quite recently.* Okay, the animation was not liked by anyone in my house other than me, to be fair. The style is fairly primitive but, with the budgetary constraints, I think the pretence of stylistic simplicity to mask the fact that this isn’t a Disney or Fleisher production is quite charming, in a way (yeah, some things never change when it comes to money... as the BBC’s reconstructed, animated episodes on various Doctor Who releases demonstrate).

But, I think this has two big things going for it. Unlike Davies, I don’t think Richard E. Grant’s performance was ‘phoned in’ and I think what he manages to convey with his voice here, playing an absolutely enigmatic and intriguing incarnation of everyone’s favourite timelord, is actually quite brilliant (yeah, I know, I’m sure I’m in the minority when it comes to this issue but that’s my reaction and I’m sticking to it). Secondly, I think it’s extremely well written and I would have loved to see a two parter live action version of this story at some point... it kinda walks over a lot of what was being done in the Moffat and Chibnall eras of the show, as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, yes it’s a lot of nonsense about an alien hive mind creature coming to live for a time underneath the Earth after a ‘meteor’ crashes and then enslaving and controlling certain places on the planet as the precursor of a full-on invasion with, I have to say, lots of pseudo-science plot points which kinda went over my head... but it was entertaining and thoughtful hokum at the very least and I was kinda into it. The surprise reveal about a certain aspect of this version of The Master also means the show had more than its share of unexpected moments and, yeah, like I said, intriguing and somewhat complex stuff.

It does get dull in a few places and, to be fair, I spotted one of two continuity errors but, it’s pretty fun stuff and so I’m surprised that Scream Of The Shalka isn’t more mentioned in Doctor Who lore. Although, I didn’t watch it at the time because, I didn’t see something streaming on the net as a proper venue for moving image content (and I still don’t... streaming sucks... time to get physical again, people!). Also, I’m not entirely sure I knew about it at the time... publicity for this thing can’t have been that good and I don’t remember anyone talking about it in those days. My loss, as it turns out.

So there you have it. Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka was, I think, much better than it deserved to be and, for my money, much more entertaining than I was expecting it to be. The only poor thing about the experience is that animation does not sit well with the DVD format, where you are always going to see some kind of bitmapping at play. A shame, then, that the story has not been reissued on Blu Ray since that’s a much smoother medium for presenting animated content, for sure.

*Okay, this morning but, by the time this one gets up on the blog, probably a number of weeks ago.

Murder On The Orient Express

Get Christie Love

Murder On The Orient Express
Malta/USA 2017 Directed by Kenneth Branagh
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

So here we go again with another movie version continuing the exploits of famed crime writer Agatha Christie’s “world’s greatest detective”... no, not Batman... Hercule Poirot. I remember seeing the old Albert Finney version of Murder On The Orient Express back in the mid 1970s (possibly on a re-release) and I kinda half liked it at the time. I remember the solution to the mystery being somewhat unexpected (well, I would only have been 6 or 7 years old, maybe) and it interested me enough that I went on to see the Peter Ustinov Poirot movies at my local cinema when they were released.

Kenneth Branagh is here with this new reboot and, honestly, it’s not a terrible film although it’s not quite as 'refreshed' as I was expecting it to be. There are, however, some brave attempts to liven things up throughout the film. To be honest, one of the reasons I didn’t bother with this one at the cinema last year is because I couldn’t imagine it translating that well for the younger generation of movie goers the film needed to set in its sights to guarantee a bankable interest. Especially since, once you know the final solution to the whodunnit at the heart of the story, you probably don’t need to see another version of it.

Branagh puts himself front and centre here as Christie’s much loved (except by her) character and, when I say ‘front and centre’, I really do mean it. It’s a film which seems to be top loaded with medium/long shots except for quite a number of close ups on the directing/acting force of nature who is top lining the film. To be fair, though, he does have quite entrancing blue eyes and it doesn’t seem too out of place to expect that kind of camera attention given to Poirot.

Like the 1974 version, Murder On The Orient Express boasts a star studded cast with the likes of Johnny Depp as the murder victim (who seems to have fallen out of favour with audiences at the moment, for some reason but allow me to still make that Poirots Of The Caribbean pun), Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and Derek Jacobi. However, as I said, a lot of the film is medium and long shots and though a few characters do get to shine for a few minutes at a time, the ensemble of these people sharing screen time is what’s more important here and Branagh doesn’t let himself be intimidated by the number of famous film stars who have climbed aboard for the journey.

There are a few attempts to liven up the story with a sense of dynamism... the opening ‘end of mission’ scene were Poirot’s perfectly placed walking stick ends up to be the undoing of the villain of the hour, the punch up after Poirot has been shot, the chase outside the train in the snow after it has been derailed by an avalanche... but these things don’t really make much difference to the general scheme of things, it has to be said.

What does make a huge difference to the tone and watchability of the film is the beautiful way in which Branagh, with his director’s head on, composes the shots with his cinematographer and there’s some truly stunning stuff here where he uses the 65mm format film to highlight some great designs (which is now making me regret not seeing this one at the cinema). He expertly uses various chunks of different texture such as the walls of a carriage against the glass windows, for instance, to section his actors off and highlight their place in the screen space. Indeed, he quite often replaces the naturally occurring verticals found in a variety of situations with various actors standing in front of them. So, for instance, the two vertical strips separating train carriage windows would have various characters standing or sitting in front of them with their positions on screen allowing the composition to still work without it jarring.

One of my favourite instances of these kinds of set ups in the film is where he has a shot of Branagh aligned against a vertical wall with the landscape to his right but with him firmly positioned in the vertical block. When the camera cuts to a closer shot of him from a different angle, he is still placed within the same vertical block (presumably he’s moved position slightly to accommodate this flow from one shot to the next) and I was impressed by this.

Another thing the director uses is a lot of those kind of Hitchcockian overhead shots where various characters can be seen from above and where you may, or may not, wish that some of the actors had a larger cleavage. Hitchcock used it maybe only once or twice in a film (if that) but Branagh really likes cutting to these kinds of views at various points in the story.

One other thing which was kind of interesting but possibly just a little distracting was the use of different glass planes next to each other to create a deliberately double image of this or that character. He does this fairly regularly (although I think Poirot himself is only seen as a single image) and I suspect it comes at points when the great detective realises that the particular person (or persons) are lying to him (although I’d have to check it again to see if I’m right). Thus, their duplicity is revealed on a less conscious level in the visual design of certain shots.

Not much more to say about this one, I think. A nice score by Branagh's regular collaborator Patrick Doyle in no way goes the same route as the famous Richard Rodney Bennet music for the 1974 version but it’s a nice one full of interesting orchestration and I might give this one a go as a stand alone listen if it’s available as a proper CD (rather than a stupid download).

Sure, there are some errors in the movie like the section of track where the train is derailed by an avalanche not actually having any mountains on it in real life but, on the whole, I quite enjoyed Branagh’s very self aware revitalisation of the character’s exploits. The end of this one kinda half contradicts Poirot’s original reason for being on the train in the first place, as he is met by someone who needs him to look into a murder on the Nile. So, yeah, the next movie along, if they get the green light to make one, will be Death On The Nile, I guess. I would quite like to see that if Branagh is still on board because I think what he’s done here is take a quite old school story and made it, not exactly relevant but certainly something which has a place in the pantheon of modern cinema. So maybe give Murder On The Orient Express a go if you’re not too precious about the way in which Christie’s famous character is handled.

Tomb Raider

Bust In Show

Tomb Raider
2018 UK/USA Directed by Roar Uthaug
UK cinema release print.

Remember when Robert DeNiro ate himself into all that extra weight so he could play Jake La Motta? Or that time when Christian Bale slimmed his weight down to almost nothing to play the central protagonist in The Machinist? This is what an actor does to get himself closer to the look and feel of the character he or she is playing. This is why I just don’t like Daniel Craig as James Bond. In the books, Bond has short black hair. Not smudgy blondy browny stuff (admittedly he has a facial scar too which they should have had right from the start of the movies). Anyway, this is why I can’t take the character of James Bond as seriously as the new films seem to want me to. Like Roger Moore’s version of the character... it’s just not James Bond unless they get the physical details right too.

Now do you remember when Angelina Jolie played Lara Croft for the first two Tomb Raider movies? She wore false breast enhancers because, presumably, she knew how integral the character’s huge bust size was to getting her characterisation right. I have those statistics written down in a celebratory magazine about the original computer game character somewhere. I can’t remember the exact size but the point is that they were important enough at the time that the game publishers knew exactly what the measurements were... possibly because her bosoms helped her keep her balance on crossing dinosaur filled chasms on precariously balanced logs, I should think. So, as much as I love Alicia Vikander as an actress... and I really do, she’s great... I really can’t take her that seriously as an on screen version of Lara Croft if she’s not trying to bring the physical attributes of the character into cinemas with her.

That being said... it’s totally not Alicia Vikander’s fault because, apparently, the various games which have continued the series long after I stopped playing them (I’d finished with the third or fourth game in the series, I think) have been completely contradictory with the various back stories and origins of the character as the series progressed and, yes, even to the point where they reduced her bust size... which is just crazy. I think they should have just been confident enough with the character to do the right thing by her and leave her exactly the same as she always has been and it’s quite sad that they should make these changes.

So, although I am quite offended that they have chosen to change all these things and reduce the character to a point where she completely loses integrity... yeah, I can’t lay the blame for that at the door of the new writers, director or star. Not their fault, I think.

As it happens, the new Tomb Raider film plays hard and fast with the legend of Lara Croft again anyway and she’s actually trying to make her pennies last in this because she doesn’t, by choice, have control over her potential inheritance. People seem to have forgotten... and so does the internet search engines, by the looks of it... that Lara Croft was originally born on something like January 10th 1968 (one day after my own birthday) and not February the 14th, which is what it was changed to a few years later to make a nice tie in with Valentine’s Day. The new movie is set contemporary to its release, which means the central character should be 50 years old now. So... clean slate and a reboot of sorts, it seems. Forget everything you thought you knew about Lara for this one because... they’re just making things up as they go for the movie.

It’s not a bad movie, though, despite having some fairly negative reviews...

Vikander is, as you would expect, excellent in the lead role (as she is in just about any role she takes on, as far as I’m concerned) and she pretty much carries the film. She is ably assisted by Dominic Cooper as her father (another character who has had a name change over the years), Walton Goggins as the villain Mathias Vogel and Daniel Wu as her new sidekick Lu Ren. And, yeah, it’s a straight up action adventure in the style of the original proposition of the first games I used to play... a kind of updated Raiders Of The Lost Ark with a female Indiana Jones figure front and centre. Or back and centre really because the third person gaming style engine on the originals meant you saw a heck of a lot more of Lara’s wiggly backside than you did of anything else, if memory serves.

And... contrary to some reports I’ve heard... it’s no better or worse than the previous Tomb Raider films and, since I quite liked the previous movies, that’s fine by me. It’s a straight, archaeology in action kind of deal and, although there are no new modern twists in the tale, which I suspect is the reason it’s getting something of a lukewarm reception, it is pretty well made and it doesn’t get too dull. Even though... and this is a shame... the story has been stripped of any supernatural elements and, perhaps, resembles more an episode of Scooby Doo in that it leads the audience in with the strong promise of a terrifying, death dealing super being and instead gives us a different and less incredible reveal than we were, perhaps, hoping for.

Still, it’s a fun film and I thought it hit a lot of the right notes.

Visually it’s very interesting because there’s a richness to the images and textures throughout. By that I mean that the director has gone out of his way to give the film a certain amount of depth to it. Not in terms of the 3D version I saw... the 3D is rather unnecessary here... but in the way that he uses various layers on screen to show the audience more going on in the background than they might get usually. It’s essentially the same trick that director Roger Corman used to use on stuff like his famous Edgar Allan Poe inspired films for AIP back in the 1960s... he always used to leave a door open into another room/part of the set to add depth and interest to the frame composition. Director Uthaug seems to be using the same kind of method here and it works fairly well. There’s never, visually at least, a dull moment.

That being said, my favourite part of the movie was the first twenty or so minutes, set in London, where the basic character of Lara is set up in somewhat contradictory form to what we have known from the character in the past. This includes a dodgy appearance by Nick Frost and a truly cool bicycle chase sequence that, alas, seems to top anything else that comes later in the movie. That being said, the director has at least tried to put in a lot of trade mark, physical ‘character situations’ from the game and you will see Lara stumble and fall and generally be placed in the way of various death traps during the course of her adventure. So that’s kind of nice.

Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) continues to show great proficiency as a film score composer and I’m pleased to see that this one, at least, has a CD release. It’s appropriate to the piece and has many nice moments which really help hold the movie together. My understanding is that he gave up the Justice League gig (reviewed here) to work on this one so I’m guessing he was a player of the old Tomb Raider games back in the day.

Ad there’s not much else to say about this one, I think. Other than stick around for a few seconds into the final credits to see another iconic piece of Miss Croft’s imagery added into the mix. A well put together action movie which has nothing really special going for it but which certainly succeeds in pretty much everything it’s trying to do. Maybe give Tomb Raider a go if you are a fan of the games or the Angelina Jolie movies.

Stratton

Stratton ‘til Morning

Stratton
2017 UK Directed by Simon West
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some very minor spoilerage in this one.

I always find Simon West a bit hit and miss as a director, to be honest. I hadn’t thought too much of the Stratton trailer when I saw it a few weeks ago but was willing to give it a try because I quite like Dominic Cooper and it’s rare that I actually get to see him headlining a movie... especially an action movie, no less. I loved him as the vampire turned hunter in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (reviewed here), for instance. Stratton is based on the main character from the majority of Duncan Falconer’s novels and is a bit of a stand in for Falconer himself, who modelled the character after his time in the Special Boat Service of the Royal Navy (basically the Navy’s version of the SAS). However, I don’t think this movie is based on any of the specific Stratton novels, or they would have been more forthcoming with a ‘based on’ credit at least somewhere (although I could be wrong).

Now, it has to be said that the film has had some pretty awful word of mouth and, to be fair, it does have its problems but the film is not too bad if you don’t mind the action sequences seeming a bit lacking in this one. Of course, you could argue it’s an action film but, to avoid disappointment, you might want to tell yourself it’s a secret agent film with some action sequences thrown in. Either way, if you’re going for the action you might want to have a little rethink as no reviewer, I would imagine, would call this ‘high octane’ stuff. However, like I said, it’s not too bad.

The film opens strongly with two agents, one of whom is Dominic Cooper as Stratton, as they go through an underwater tube/pipe system to penetrate a ‘secret lair’ but the mission goes horribly wrong due to incorrect intel and also the fact that “the bad guys” knew they were coming. This opening sequence, following on from some nicely designed main titles, is quite suspenseful and everything you could want it to be... up until a point. That point being when the two agents leave the tube system and find themselves in an empty complex with the object of their mission already snaffled by the bad guys, a load of dead workers and a load of gunmen standing between them and their extraction point. It’s here that the inadequacy of the budget (which I assume was low on the evidence of the resulting film) seems to sink in and things get less exciting. For instance, when Stratton lets off all the charges that he and his fellow agent have planted in the ‘is it a secret lair or... what the heck is it’ place, well... we had indoor fireworks once, when I was a kid and, to be honest, they had more of a bang than the sad, little explosion that occurs here.

And that’s the real big problem with this film... the action sequences. I don’t know if the stunts and effects work in this were affected by a terribly low budget, as I imagine it to be, or were just not very well conceived. The case could be made that the dialogue scenes leading up to and around those ‘not quite set pieces’ are actually quite good (although a little predictable) but I did think the writers did well in painting some nice little portraits of the lead character and his team.

Of course, the actors here more than pull their weight with that dialogue, with Cooper ably supported by Derek Jacobi as his ‘boat life friend’ as well as Connie Nielsen, who I’d recently seen as Queen Hippolyta in Wonder Woman (reviewed here), a role she will be reprising in the upcoming Justice League movie, by the looks of things. Here, she plays Stratton’s boss and the dynamic is like a slightly more active version of the Judi Dench version of M from the Bond films but it kinda works and I was quite impressed how the character didn’t do the obvious things like reprimanding the team for the various shenanigans that they botch up during their missions and she seemed like a really fair boss to work for, I’d have to say. Also, watch out for a lady on Stratton’s team called Aggy... she is played here by an actress called Gemma Chan and she’s one of those people who dominates the screen whenever she’s on. I wouldn’t be surprised if some director cottons on to this in future and she starts getting some major league roles (fingers crossed).

Cooper himself is okay in the lead role but I just didn’t really believe him as the kind of action man the writers wanted me to think of him as. I know Henry Cavill dropped out a week before shooting this and I wonder how tailored the role was to that actor. I do know Cooper looks uncannily like GI Joe in this one than was too close for comfort. And by that I mean the specific English character called GI Joe. To explain, as a child no kid had the internet or even much of a hint as to what was going on in the rest of the world in the same period of history other than what they caught on TV so we weren’t really aware of global, alternative brand names. In England, the American GI Joe line was manufactured by Palitoy and known over here, quite affectionately by people of a certain age, as Action Man. However, one of the 'action men' had a scruffy looking beard and that one was known as GI Joe. And it’s this scruffy beard that both Dominik Cooper and his new work partner, played by Austin Stowell, are wearing in this movie as they pursue the bad guy played by Thomas Kretschmann and... I don’t know, it was almost a ‘comedy’ beard as far as I was concerned. I don’t think it helps make Dominic Cooper look like a ‘manly man’s man’ at all and it kind of slips into the realm of camp humour at certain points. Ah well, at least his beard and moustache didn’t get better lines than he did and, despite this slight problem, Mr. Cooper still does a fantastic and believable job with his character so... not complaining too much.

The score, by the way, by Nathaniel Méchaly, is absolutely superb and plays just like the score to a modern Bond movie, only better. It seems to be used a lot in an almost inappropriately up tempo style to make the scenes somehow play faster than they actually are and I couldn’t help but think of a young Elmer Bernstein employing the same tactic to speed up the pacing of The Magnificent Seven all those decades ago. Méchaly does some really good work here and I truly think EON productions should give this one a listen and maybe give him a shot at the next Bond film because, quite frankly, he’s already doing it here. This stuff is in a way different ball park from his earlier scores for the Taken trilogy, for sure. Such a shame, then, that the score is unavailable to buy at the time of writing this review. A nice CD of this would not go amiss.

But like I said, the action is a bit of a problem here. Other action movies might end with a shoot out or chase on a cruise liner or an aircraft or with a big building going boom... this one has a double decker bus chase. Not that I’m knocking the ability of the humble double decker bus to take part in action movies, after all we’ve seen the effectiveness of said transportation in both Live And Let Die (reviewed here) and The Mummy Returns. It has to be said, though, the ending of this movie falls a little shy of spectacular and the post-action scene stab at the possibility of a future romance in Stratton’s life seems like such an afterthought that it’s a little laughable. Also, there’s a twist with one of the characters which is revealed about half way through but, even though I had no clue there should be a twist, I figured out that there would be because one of the characters seemed a little too shady. Which is bizarre but I saw it coming from the opening sequence onwards in terms of the identity of the ‘mole’ in the department so, yeah, not so well played by the writers, on that one, I felt.

All in all, Stratton is not a bad movie... just a little flat. In fact, what it reminded me of mostly was of a really great 'made for TV' movie of the 1970s where they got everything right. It’s just not what I would expect to see being touted in a modern cinema setting. More like an extended episode of The Professionals than something the big leaguers would be knocking out. That being said, I did find it quite enjoyable and diverting so I’ve really no complaints and it genuinely doesn’t deserve the negative attention it’s been getting, that’s for sure. So... see it if you like to watch the odd bit of adventure storytelling and you don’t mind if the action choreography seems a little tame in places. There have been worse movies thrust onto an unsuspecting public this year.